“Who will write the history of tears? The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel returns to this question in Roland Barthes’ work. A loving speech (1977). Once fleetingly named, she is a writer, looking back on her childhood in Sri Lanka before her family migrated to Sydney, then reflecting on her life in Melbourne to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Although her Sydney boyfriend has betrayed her, desire remains as central to her focus as the question of what a novel can do.

It’s 1986 and theory – or theory – dominates universities. The department’s designated feminist gives her supervisee a “core” reading list, used to “bring Sydney graduates up to speed”. Happy to learn a new language – that of aporias, logocentrism and difference – the narrator soon feels “headed and crushed”, despite Theory’s “beautiful radical ideas”. His thesis will have to crush the ideas about Woolf’s novels “in the corset of theory”. She will return there with shame.

When she meets Kit, it’s hard to tell whether her “deconstructed” relationship with golden-haired Olivia is ersatz polyamory or recklessness. A loving speech – Barthes’ taxonomy of the love experience, woven with allusions to literature and the ideas of friends – describes the joy, the monsters and the pain of waiting. De Kretser’s narrator experiences all of this while waiting for Kit, “patient as dust” – one of De Kretser’s many stunning metaphors.

Besides Barthes’ tears, she remembers the advice she heard from one student to another: “Be the one who breaks things up…Be the cool one.” » She’s going to see Gillian Leahy’s film My life without Steve (1986) which reveals “messy human truths” about Liz, that her boyfriend left her for another woman. What makes the narrator’s heart “beat like a hare” is the film’s focus on Liz’s inner life with its fury and obsession, its music, its writing and its reading. Liz has the same editions of the same books, the same teapot, the same bed linen, and the same cream telephone receiver, which seem like “superficial, if creepy, correspondences.” Jealousy, although stigmatized by the narrator’s friends as “a banal and contemptible emotion, a morbid symptom going against feminist practice”, constitutes a deeper point of connection.

Leahy’s Liz refuses to put uncomfortable feelings into respectable corsetry. Woolf’s exhilarating formal adventure implied a similar refusal. She turned to waves, light and “moments of being” rather than a linear narrative. She wanted to find new ways to say things that weren’t being said. In her essays, she spoke about the sexual abuse she suffered in her own home as a child. Write your penultimate novel The years (1937), Woolf hoped to interweave essays and fiction, but returned to a more conventional form.

In A room of one’s own (1929), a discursive essay based on two Woolf lectures, she twice writes that women “think back to our mothers.” De Kretser’s narrator considers her the Woolfmother. Between them is her own widowed mother, worried and watchful, who phones and writes from Sydney with no idea of ​​her daughter’s life. And between the narrator and Kit is his lover Olivia.

A room of one’s own explores homophobia and relationships between women. At the time, Woolf was in a relationship with Vita Sackville-West and was the subject of an obscenity trial over Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel. The well of loneliness (1928) was in progress. Woolf imagines a scene in which two women work together and “Chloe loved Olivia.” This is Woolf, a man of justice, one who defended women’s rights to friendship and love, as well as the financial and intellectual freedom to write, “a room of one’s own”.

De Kretser’s novel begins with another novel, which ends abruptly. The narrator appears and tells us that her work has stalled. She then remembers an abusive piano examiner and immediately understands, as a small child, that talking about the abuse would lead to shame and accusations of lying. There are fragments of newspapers that react to reading about Israeli military commander Aviv Kohavi’s application of situationist theory to West Bank raids and to the discovery of Donald Friend’s abuse of boys in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Bali. These and other intertwined pieces bring together separate but connected abuses of power and the capacity of new forms to represent “a desire to see the world differently.” The little child reduced to silence, now a writer, refuses to insert violence into the narrative corset of shame.

Although Woolf brilliantly recreated the form to express the unspeakable, moving from childhood silence to frank plea, there were things she could not or would not see. She made anti-Semitic remarks about her Jewish husband and, shockingly, De Kretser’s narrator discovers a passage in her diary describing a “poor little mahogany-colored wretch” who visited the Woolfs. He was EW Perera, a revered Ceylonese lawyer and anti-imperialist activist. The narrator looks at herself “mahogany” in the mirror. Her photo of Woolf falls from the wall above her desk. Every mother disappoints. Both “built my brain”.

Celebrated internationally, de Kretser has twice won numerous awards, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Scary monsters (2021) won the fiction category of the International Rathbones Folio Prize in 2023. Theory and practice is revolutionary in its intimate anatomy of the story of tears, in both directions – crying and splitting. Politics, another writer tells the narrator, invites us to “care about people we can’t see, and the difficulty of that was the difficulty of life.” Connecting betrayals of trust in this inclusive and utterly captivating loose-leaf novel, de Kretser finds new form and language for unapologetic testimony.

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Theory and practice

By Michelle de Kretser

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